Does rice save wet electronics?

After dumping a cup of tea on a my computer, I sealed it in a bag with uncooked rice to dry out. Luckily it is now working, but I got to wondering - does the rice actually help the drying process? I wanted to test this out. First I filled three cups with 100 g water each - one test and two controls.

Weighed out some rice.

Three conditions: sealed with rice, sealed without rice, and open to the air. I marked the total starting weight of the cups.

After 36 hours, weighing to see how much water was lost! The sealed bag didn't evaporate much, as you'd expected. (The error on the scale is around 1 g)

Surprisingly, the rice bag didn't lose any detectable mass either!

The rice seems to have absorbed around 1 g of water though - a good result?

No! The cup left open to the air lost 4 g of water, much more than the rice. While this is just a single test, I think the rice drying technique needs to be checked!